Seaside and the Jersey Shore: Five Questions for Katie Runde, Author of The Shore, Our June Discover Pick

By Kate Runde / May 24, 2022 at 3:57 am

Hardcover $26.99

The Shore: A Novel

In Stock Online

Hardcover $26.99

The Shore, a fresh take on the classic coming-of-age story from debut author Katie Runde, is a must-add to your Summer Reading TBR list. Every member of the Dunne family faces real challenges in a beautiful (and slim) novel that will make you laugh and break your heart. Fans of Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane and Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach—this one is perfect for you. (Katie joins us on our Poured Over podcast 6/4). Below, you’ll find Katie’s answers to five of our burning questions after reading the book!

In the book, there are multiple references to The Girl with the Long Shadow. Is there a particular meaning or sentimentality within the title/what made you decide to go with this book?

I personally love to “escape” in my own reading with more realistic fiction, but I wanted Margot to be the kind of person who craves escape into more fantasy novels, into realms so far removed from the rules that govern life and death and how time marches forward here in our reality. I imagined the girl in the fictional book The Girl with the Long Shadow to have a fearlessness and power that follows her no matter where she time travels, and for that to be something Margot longed for and got to have, in short doses, when she reads.

In some ways, the setting of Seaside seemed like just as much a character in the story as it was a place, particularly for Margot. Did you know from the beginning that the small town on the Jersey Shore would be the driving force between the relationships and motives of so many of your characters?

Yes! After growing up there and seeing this one side of it portrayed in pop culture, I wanted to show the lives of the people who lived there all year and ran the businesses and also what drew them there, what keeps them there, what it’s like to grow up there, and what life is like there in the off-season when the summer crowds leave. As I lived in different places and had to re-introduce myself all over the country, I found it to be almost a compulsion to have to tell every new person I met everything about this place, and I missed it, and had to leave to not take for granted what a weird, interesting place it had been to grow up.

Your family ran boardwalk businesses on the Jersey Shore. Did you have a favorite type of business to work at or that your family owned when there?

We had snack bars, umbrella rentals, games, parking lots, and I would always beg my dad to work on the beach in the umbrella rental stand instead of ringing up hot dogs. And he would say, sure, you can work there on your day off! My whole extended family and anyone from my school who asked for a job as well as random people my dad pulled in off the boardwalk all worked there, and there was no system at all for who ordered what. You just yelled out to people that their hot dog was ready, but everyone there ordered hot dogs! It was beautiful chaos. All our food was from the Sysco truck, but we had these people who came every summer on their vacations, every day, just to listen to the same Springsteen 1975-85 Live album we played all day long and talk about life with my dad. So that was my favorite too.

In so many ways, this book is an exploration of love and loss, particularly losses that happen before someone dies. What do you hope readers take away from your book when they’ve turned the final page?

There is such a particular loneliness and exhaustion and dissociation that comes with caring for someone who is not themselves, especially if they’re pretty young, but finding one other person in the world who’s been there helps. I first felt that you, too feeling when I read Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong and We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. If readers feel that, I would be so happy.

We wouldn’t be booksellers if we didn’t ask — what are you reading and recommending right now?

Yes!! Some of my favorite recent reads have been Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson and Joan is OK by Weike Wang, both of which have narrators I would follow anywhere. And I loved Teenager by Bud Smith, which is a young love, on-the-run book that is beautiful a wild ride, not a combination you see too often. I just finished A Quiet Life by Ethan Joella, out in November, which I loved.